BBC3 and BBC4: who's watching what?

As the debate about the future of BBC3 and BBC4 thunders on (axe it! save it! merge it!) we spend a week looking at the ratings performance of the two under-fire digital channels. Value for money or time to hit the off button?

Tuesday update: Only slightly later than anticipated - what were you watching on BBC3 and BBC4 last night?

Just to recap, as part of the debate about the two channels we're looking at their output and asking how much they deserve to be saved from the axe. And no, it's not just about the ratings.

BBC3 had a brand new documentary, How Dirty Can I Get?, in which Nicky Taylor discovered just that by not washing for 40 days. It sounds utterly pointless to me, but Guardian reviewer Sam Wollaston quite liked it, if only to see Taylor back on the box.

It had 368,000 viewers - pretty good for a BBC3 documentary without being ratings dynamite - but the big audiences went to shows you could already have seen elsewhere - EastEnders, Doctor Who and Little Britain, with 502,000, 380,000 and 252,000 viewers respectively.

So not much you would necessarily want to save there, then. In the age of video on demand, isn't the argument for so many rapid repeats fatally flawed?

It was a good night for another original documentary on BBC4 with Comics Britannia, which opened with 426,000 viewers. Channel bosses will doubtless be very happy with that. But only one other BBC4 show managed to break into three figures - Bombay Railway. Not quite so good.

Coming up tonight is the sort of schedule which has me reaching for the BBC3 off switch - docusoap Dog Borstal, life swap show Outrageous Wasters, Doctor Who repeats and loads of episodes of Three Pints of Lager. Eugh!

Over on BBC4, it is likely to win more plaudits than viewers with its drama documentary, Luther: Driven to Defiance, starring Timothy West. Nothing wrong with that, though.

Monday

Nothing sums up the argument both for and against BBC4 like its Saturday night schedule. Proms in the Park, its live coverage of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's open-air concert in Glasgow, averaged just 43,000 viewers across nearly three hours, a 0.2% of the audience.

By the end of it just 23,000 people were watching, according to unofficial overnight figures. But the flip side is that those who were watching probably loved it, the sort of live music programming - with a licence fee-funded orchestra, no less - that is not readily available elsewhere.

But could the BBC have saved money and shown it on a merged BBC2/BBC4 instead? Maybe. BBC2 dedicated nearly two hours of its schedule to Bend It Like Beckham, the Keira Knightley which could easily find a home somewhere else on the BBC schedule.

Cut Crisis On Jimmy's Farm - no-one's going to miss that, surely? - and the proms would have fitted perfectly well on BBC2 and presumably found a much bigger audience.

Around the same time on BBC3, 423,000 were watching another James Spader sci-fi movie Stargate, hardly an essential BBC offering. I can see the argument for rapid repeats of new programmes, but why Stargate merited another showing on BBC3 less than 24 hours later is beyond me.

The rest of BBC3's Saturday night schedule does not strike me as obviously public service fare either, with Gaffes Galore Outtakes (63,000 viewers), a double whammy of World Cup Outtakes (176,000 and 144,000 respectively) and, oh look, Football Gaffes Galore (130,000).

Then comes Top Gear Gaffes... oh no, hang on, this is just a plain old Top Gear repeat, earning the channel its second biggest audience of the night, after Stargate, with 348,000 viewers. Well, everyone loves Clarkson and Hammond (not the other one, though). But as anyone who has looked at UKTV will know, the schedules are not exactly short of Top Gear repeats are they?

I'm going to stick to the primetime schedules rather than the early hours stuff, but just because I know it gets an awful lot of your goats, BBC3 schedules FOUR episodes of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps in the early hours of Sunday morning. Four! Come midnight, 190,000 of you were watching it.

Back on BBC4, just 24,000 people watched documentary A Story of The Circus at 7pm - oh dear - while rather more (218,000) watched a repeat of Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out, celebrating the QI man's 50th birthday.

Onto Sunday, where Stargate was again BBC3's highest rating programme with 358,000 viewers. Ah, so THAT'S why they scheduled it two days in a row!

There's another Gaffes Galore Outtakes - only for five minutes, though - and greater encouragement to be had with a brand new documentary, I'm A Boy Anorexic. Some 266,000 of you watched that, a 1.4% share of the audience at 9pm.

At the same time on BBC4, 139,000 people were watching documentary repeat, The Women's Institute, followed by "another showing" for one-off Charles Dance drama, Consenting Adults, which had an audience of 133,000.

There were more repeats on BBC3 from 10pm with the entire six episodes of the first series of its comedy sketch show, Rush Hour. Great if you are a big fan of the show, I have no doubt, but there don't appear to be too many of them - the first episode had 104,000 viewers, but by the fifth it had sunk to half that.

Highlights tonight include BBC4 documentary Comics Britannia and, on its sister channel, a documentary that sounds like classic BBC3 fare - How Dirty Can I Get?, in which a documentary maker doesn't wash for 40 days. Answer: quite dirty, probably. Find out tonight at 9pm!

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